Ramblings

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~~Title:Abuse~~
<fs x-large>Abuse</fs> is the treatment of things, alive or inanimate, outside of their respective normal use cases that is likely to result in significant damage to that or another object or individual. General wear and tear does not pass the "significant" [[qualifier]] and usually occurs normally even inside of the person's or object's normal use case. Abuse does not necessitate intent((In terms of interpersonal relations, abuse is always defined with involving intent. Or is it? What about a depressed mother neglecting her children? The intent question in the word "abuse" can vary widely between specific examples.)) nor does it require any damage to actually occur, but if an intent to harm is present this can be the basis for a legal case against the abuser.((Although of course the absence of action to prevent harm from coming someone's way can be good enough as well.)) From an ethics standpoint, abuse should always be avoided where there are better alternatives. In ethics, we will primarily care about //patterns of abuse//. Everyone may be abusive to someone at some point in their life and humans are good at shrugging off individual blows, but real damage will usually occur if the abuse occurs in a pattern, ie. it happens repeatedly.((This is not to say, of course, that no one individual event isn't able to traumatize or significantly damage a person or object, but in every day life such events are rare and massively dwarfed by the sustained, every-day abuse we go through.))\\
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Abuse comes in many flavors, but the most prominent are //emotional//, //physical// (which is an extension of the first one) and then types I will dub "secondary abuse types" because they generally are things that cause harm either emotionally or physically and only differ in their expression, such as //sexual// and //neglect//.
====== Abuse vectors - About emotional and physical abuse ======
The most subtle, often overlooked but - in my opinion - the most important factor of abuse happens mentally, emotionally. Humans exist in their respective brains and their lives are primarily determined by the things they //feel//. How we feel about ourselves and our life depends on how we feel, and if we are made to feel bad then we feel bad. This may appear silly at first, but is actually a very important and central point to keep in mind when looking at abuse. Any kind of hurt is essentially a feeling, even just physical hurt is just a feeling in our bodies, so if we can avoid being hurt then this involves our emotions and our feelings in general. Whether something hurts us depends on our brains and can be altered. Painkillers for example might lessen or completely remove pain. Pain, hurt and suffering are all things that happen in our brains, and physical pain is no different in our brain from emotional pain. Physical and emotional suffering are both essentially "just" signals in our brains.\\
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The point I am making is that **emotional abuse and physical abuse are the same thing**. The distinction is not in the mechanisms of the abuse inside of the brain (both kinds speak to the so-called "anti-reward" mechanism in the brain), it's about how this abuse is delivered. Both hurt, but inducing suffering in another person can be achieved in different ways and this is usually what we mean when we say "emotional abuse" and "physical abuse". It's the causing of suffering, either by affecting your emotions or by inflicting direct physical pain, although internally the processes in the brain are not different from each other. Physical abuse in this context simply means things like hitting a person, [[Parenting|spanking children]] - oh no this is an entirely different topic, let's not start - **and often naturally involves emotional abuse**. Consider that assault like this is usually an outburst, an expression of contempt, of superiority and control (a message of "I can do this to you and you are defenseless against me") and hurts much more than the actual, physical pain being inflicted. The rejection and abandonment is the primary abuse taking place in those moments.\\
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So the problem then is that such rejection and abandonment can be communicated in many ways and does never necessitate physical force. In fact, because emotional abuse in this sense is so under-recognized, it is extremely prevalent and often overlooked. At the same time, not all rejection, not all suffering equals abuse. Again, the qualifier "significant" does a lot of heavy lifting - a continuous trickle of "micro-aggressions" such as sighs or ignoring someone over an extended period of time can constitute as much abuse as a single broken rib bone in a domestic situation would be considered abuse. Even if ever so small, parents continuously putting down their children, continuously criticizing their actions and/or person, infantilizing their children, denying them their agency and/or maturity, being controlling/authoritarian, neglecting the child's need for love and support, etc. are all ways in which rejection and abandonment are being communicated without ever laying a finger on that child, and similar things of course exist outside of the paedagogic realm as well.\\
In general, a good balance needs to be found to guide and raise one's children into the right direction, but using the least abusive means necessary. This is often where the issue begins to fail, is that parents do not or are unwilling to see that there are other and better ways to teach a child to do things a certain way. Even though there is lots of guides on how to "do punishments right", this always operates on the premise that even punishments "done right" should be forgone for better alternatives, //which there are//.((They //are// there, trust me.))
====== Sexual Abuse ======
//See the main article on this topic: [[Rape]]//\\
Sexual abuse like sexual assault or [[Rape]] is the act of likely inflicting suffering by means significantly involving sexual aspects. Sexual abuse is one of the strongest ways to hurt people by virtue of being extremely personal, extremely intimate, disempowering and, well, making one feel "weak". I have not been sexually assaulted and cannot do the severity of this kind of abuse justice with just my words, for which I am sorry. By everything I have heard, sexual abuse happens not //primarily// because of sexual attraction, it's a method to control and harm the victim, to really hurt them mentally, scar them for life, make someone feel more powerless than a gun to the head ever could((This "primarily" here is important, I am not going to deny that there aren't cases where it is primarily sexual attraction, or that most sexual abuse offenses do not involve at least a degree of sexual attraction as a causal factor.)). This is something repeated across domains, for example manifesting itself as systemic [[misogyny]], disempowering women and making them powerless against a male offender in the courts of law, or out on the roads, or in career prospects, or in how women are paid, or in marital laws generally designed to keep women dependent on their husbands, turning wives into childbearers and -carers, et cetera((See [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od1X6AEN7j8|"Der allerletzte Safe Space für Männer in Deutschland: Die Ehe | ZDF Magazin Royale"]].)).